A Very Silly Beer

I decided to clean/clear out/re-organise the kitchen cupboards today. This was partly because I feel a need to be productive (still looking for a summer job), partly to, well, clean the kitchen, and partly to annoy my other half – she always seems like a confused puppy when I re-arrange the house without telling her, and it’s so cute. However, to be kind, I’ve put some of the important stuff in lower shelves so they’re easier for her to reach.

Anyhoo, the whole reason for this blog is not to regale you with my domestic adventures, but to show off what I found at the back of one of the cupboards:

Monty Python’s Holy Gr-Ail

It’s a bottle of Monty Python’s Holy Grail. A strong (4.7% abv.) ale that’s tempered over burning witches – it says so on the bottle. And yes, that’s also the autograph of the still-sexy Carol Cleveland.

I got this several years back (2008?) when I went to Doune Castle for the Monty Python Day. I actually heard about the whole thing – apparently a yearly event – from my Canadian friend who was living over here at the time so we both had a very fun and very silly day out. Actually, it wasn’t that silly.

Oh, there were people there being silly, and that was fun. The still-sexy Carol Cleveland was there, but she was just being still-sexy and not really very silly.  I have a picture to prove it:

Carol Cleveland and Me, not being silly.

You know, looking at that picture, we do look like we’re being a bit silly. It’s the grins, I think. Oh, and I totally forgot I got that t-shirt. No idea where it is. I may have been silly and thrown it out during a past clear out.

On the back, it says that it was brewed by Black Sheep Brewery in Yorkshire. The beer, that is, not Carol Cleveland. She was born in London, but grew up in the USA. Yeah, the beer is brewed in Yorkshire, so not only can the York folk legally shoot us Scots (provided they use a bow and arrow, but not on Sundays), they can apparently still burn witches in the name of a good piss-up.
They also make damn good monster comedy, which is a bit silly.

Anyhoo, back to the Monty Python day. It was fun. Lots of people had dressed up, mostly as knights. The Spanish Inquisition were there, too, which was unexpected. The day finished off with a screening of a Monty Python film. Everyone voted on which film we’d like to see in the main courtyard of the castle which featured as four different castles in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’.
We ended up watching ‘Life of Brian’.

That was a bit silly.

Episode 1, version 2: The 3D Menace

Somewhat ironically, given my last post, I went to see ‘The Phantom Menace in 3D’ last night. My cousin is visiting and asked me if I would take him so off we went. It was jolly nice to have a night at the cinema with my cus and the parentals paid for it, too.

Without wanting to digress into another dissection of the film here are my thoughts:

My (Long Overdue) Star Wars Prequel Rant Blog Post

I have recently said some bad things about the Star Wars prequels. This has been in the context of debates about the up-coming “The Phantom Menace (in 3D)” which will be appearing in cinemas soon. The debates, if you can call a string of comments on Facebook that, can pretty much be summed up as this :

“Hey, let’s go see Phantom Menace in 3D!”
“Let’s not and say we… didn’t.”
“But it’s Star Wars! On the ‘Big Screen’!”
“No, it’s The Phantom Menace on the ‘Big Screen’. In 3D.”

I stand by every bad thing I said about the film, but since I can’t find the original post, and since I’ve recently immersed myself in Star Warsyness over the past three days (okay, the past 35 years), I’d like to sum up my thoughts on ‘The Prequel Trilogy’.

Since I’m sure that most normal people get tired of reading rants, I’d like to say that I’m going to finish off with what I did like about the films. After all, just about every bad thing in the world has a good side. Even parasites.

I Found My Hope On A Website

A few nights ago, just to pass time while playing EVE (doing a 23 jump trip, if that means anything to you), I found myself on the TED website.
I like the TED site. Having been directed there a few times in the past for some of the short talks on cool and awesome stuff like ‘Minority Report’ style computer interaction and Peter Molyneux talking about game AI. I had the page bookmarked, but rarely actually visited it and certainly never to watch the serious stuff.

A few weeks ago, I discovered that Temple Grandin had done a TED talk (see my last post) and from there I slowly started skipping through more of the videos – always looking for the short ones. After all, in this day of sound bites and summaries, who want’s to sit through more than 5 mins of talking without some flashy cool thing?

The other night, as I scanned the videos on the front page, I noticed one entitled ‘Using nature to grow batteries’. Since I’ve been studying up on my science lately, I figured I’d have a look.

Hero Worship

Temple Grandin is my recently discovered hero.

I decided to start some casual study on animal behaviour last year. After reading a few books on cats and dogs, I read a book called Animals in Translation by a woman called Temple Grandin (with Catherine Johnson). It is quite simply one of the best, if not the best non-fiction book I’ve ever read. The subtitle of the book is  ’using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behaviour’ an it does just that. It is an insightful read that made me go ‘wow’ on more than one occasion – one of those books that I actually felt like I had learned something from after each chapter. If you have any interest in animal behaviour, stockmanship, the meat industry or autism, then you should read this book.

I’ve since read ‘Making Animals Happy’ by the same authors and it’s just as good. Both books present the science behind the behaviours in an easy to understand fashion.

Now that it’s perfectly clear that I am no book critic (Go read them!), I shall close this post with the TED talk that this truly inspiring woman presented in Feb last year.

Oh, and there’s also an HBO movie of her early life now. It’s called Temple Grandin and has a pretty damned impressive performance by Claire Danes.

The Grand Safari Posts

I tend to avoid ‘coming soon’ type posts, but since I’ve already done most of the work on this one, I think I’ll risk it.

This is a link to the pages I’m putting together that detail the Kenyan Safari I went on in 2006. The same Safari where I took the photo of Diaspora Lion, from the previous post on here.

As you may note, the pages for the Safari holiday are on my ‘creative blog’, while my previous holiday’s have been documented on this blog. There are three reasons for this:

1. It has been filed under ‘projects’ on my computer for nearly six years.
2. It’s involving lots of editing (photo, video and audio).
3. I started making the pages before I checked which of my blogs I was logged into.

It’s a bit of a teaser trailer at the moment, but hopefully everyone will enjoy what IS to come.

Edit: Just discovered that I can’t add audio or video without forking out the readies (or hosting it myself, but that’s another project). So, I’ll be sticking up the pages without all the bells and whistles, but still plenty of rambling from me and Awesome pictures from Kenya.

The Write White Stuff

November has been one of the most interesting and – dare I say it? Yes, I dare! – brilliant months of the year for me. It’s had both good and bad so, since everyone likes to finish on a high, here comes the bad bits first.

We’ve been snowed in and unable to get to work for the last week. Now, while that is a bit of good, in terms of money it’s actually pretty bad. I managed to get to work for only one day this week which means pay day looks to be a bit bleak come the end of December. The snow – admittedly the worst in years – has completely destroyed any kind of reliable public transport in West Lothian. Not that there was much to begin with, of course.

What A Desolate Place This Is

Suffice to say, travel from my home into town has been physically impossible for most of the week. Unless you own a car. And a shovel. Which I don’t.